Into the Fold

I cried at work today.

We were doing our morning devotions, and today, we decided to do a devotional thought over "O Come O Come Emmanuel", which happens to be my favorite Christmas song.

It also happens to correlate with my favorite Bible verse, which had been weighing on me heavily for the past week or so. This is what I shared and what brought me to big tears of remembrance and of thankfulness and humility.

It re-appeared in my heart last Thursday. I was sitting there beside my boyfriend, our mothers, and our fathers, in the Candlelight service at my university.

As I sat there, I marveled at how far removed and redeemed both our families (and us) had been in the past two years. In the past two years, both our parents had been at places where they thought they had lost their children to darkness forever.

We had thought the same about ourselves.

And in the past two years, we have been restored to joy, to God, and to our families. Granted, more work is yet to be done, but God is so good.

My heart felt full to burst, and the words of Psalm 126 pushed their way into my thoughts:

When the people returned to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon, they became as those who dreamed. Their hearts were filled with laughter; their tongues with shouts of praise. The people of Earth said to them, "The Lord has done great things for you." Indeed, the Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.

That's the verse I shared this morning after we sang.

I reflected on my own "return from Babylon" two years ago tomorrow.

I was broken. I was ugly. I was beyond all reckoning.

And my parents opened their arms up and loved me. My aunt, my uncle, my cousin, my grandmother. They loved me and took me as I was: broken. ugly. lost.

And yet, and yet!! the Lord has done great things for me. 
Though Decembers cause me to get way too deep in my head and heart and ache with the past woundedness, I know too of the deep joy of restoration to hope and light and life.

The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.

Get Squeamish: Blood and Guts

I'll bet the majority of women spend their periods wondering how it is that women, for centuries, have been able to survive such a substantial amount of blood loss each month.

I was thinking about periods today as I was reading about the woman who bled, who reached out to touch Jesus, and who was healed in her faith.

Bringing up "that time of the month" can be really uncomfortable. Even my sweet daddy, who has been married for a bazillion years to my mom, gets stuttery when he tries to be polite and ask me if I need to pick up any "personal things" at Target when I come home to the "big city" and get stocked up on life supplies (small town struggles).  

I'm sure I lost many readers in the opening sentence even by mentioning that taboo subject (Is she really writing about THAT?).

The Bible sure doesn't shy away, though. It brings up Aunt Flo several times throughout its 66 books. That brings us to the gospels, Luke 8, and the woman who bled. 

This lady had a straight up 12 year period. 

What a miserable existence.

And often, I'll bet, that's where our thinking about her ends, with her blood and with her faith.

God never just stops at the physical though.

You ever pause to think about what her plague entailed?

Women in those days were considered unclean during their periods, banned from the intimacy of relationships. Periods are good, though. They represent a woman's capacity of inhabiting life, even if they didn't take that month's egg up on the option to. 

For our Luke Lady, though, it was a 12 year symbol of death, separation, and shame.

Can you imagine that?

We have nightmares of being turned down for a date, of standing naked in front of the class, of being singled out for our big noses, but those are all pretty fleeting moments of shame.

Picture being known by your qualifier for more than a decade. For her, being known for being "unclean" for 12 years and what that must have done to her personal sense of identity.

Men are thinking, "I don't have a uterus. I can't get there to empathy." So picture just this much: No physical intimacy for 12 years. Nothing. 

It hurts to the bone to go 12 days, 12 weeks without so much as a hug, I would know.

How excruciating that must have been.

And yet. (With God there's always an "and yet") And yet, how beautiful, how wonderful, what an ecstatic sense of relief and glory it must have been to have had that bloody old self ended in one desperate touch. In one desperate move toward hope.

That is the promise of Christ.

That is what we live for: to know that no matter the degree of our unclean existence or removal from dignity, humanity, God is capable and willing to touch us, love us, bring us back to complete selfhood. 

I Make a Truce With You, Valentine's Day

Loathe would be the most correct verbal form of my hatred for Valentine's Day.

It's consumerist, materialistic, and puts enormous amounts of pressure on everyone involved.
---What does she expect? What does her best friend expect? What if she does something for me but I don't do enough for her? What if her best friend's boyfriend does something crazy romantic and I didn't come up to par? What if there's a glitter cannon mixup and chocolate syrup comes gushing out instead and she's wearing her new dress and it gets all ruined and she starts to cry and there's mascara everywhere and oh my gosh we're out in public and she's gonna hate me forever and won't even let me scoop up some of the chocolate off her arm with a pretzel?!?!

You get my point.

And, even if a girl (such as myself) truly is not a fan of large romantic gestures, nobody will believe her because it'll seem like a cover-up for her actually really, really wanting a romantic gesture. What.

V-Day has also historically been for me a day of bad news. There was a space of about four years there where something legitimately tragic happened on Valentine's Day.

So, I've held a grudge against it. In my mind, not unwarranted.

This was even to the extent that I cancelled Valentine's Day last year. Cancelled it. As in, I didn't even see my now ex on the day.

I've had a lot of time for reflection since I moved to NI in September (by that I mean that I have thought through everything on God's green Earth for lack of something better to do with my ungodly amounts of free and alone time). During that time, VDay and I have had an all-out.

It's amazing to me how many of life's decisions and revisions are driven by a deep deep rooting in fear.

For this day, there's a fear of not measuring up to expectations, of having expectations and being disappointed, of being vulnerable enough to let yourself be loved in unnecessary ways. It's what I talked about once in my definition of intimacy. 

Intimacy as that moment of tension, that point at which you're dancing on the edge and could either fall to your death or jump to a higher ledge.

When I realized at what depth my hatred really did stem from terror and how much I was denying myself as well as other people an opportunity for relational growth, I owed VDay some reconsideration and an apology.

Still not a fan of the gross spectacle it has become, nor am I cozy with being fussed over in almost any capacity, but I recognize that there is some intrinsic value in its existence, if not solely its history.

For that reason, Valentine's Day, you are safe from my slander and cancellation tenancies.  We can now be friends. 

Verbal Nudity

For the past four days, I have been in Siloam Springs.

A lot of people challenged me on this decision (for a variety of reasons), but I went because I graduated early, and all my friends are still on campus, not to mention my professor friends. 

Three and a half absolutely packed days of meetings, friend dates, coffee, and Jenga. 

There wasn't a friend specifically assigned to Jenga, but I've found over the years that if I ever have an awkward space of time on campus, if I sit in Walker Student Center for 5 or more minutes, someone I know and like (but unfortunately neglected to schedule time with) will show up. 

And, because sometimes interactions with friends like that--the ones you really like but don't always know what to talk about with--can be a bit awkward, Jenga. It's the perfect amount of social distraction. Not so focus-necessary that you can't focus on your conversation but just enough that you can focus energy on it if the conversation feels slow. 

In this way, my free time was enriched by several people I haven't been able to have a chance to speak with in months, and it added so much flavor I would have entirely missed out on. 

Going to Siloam also offered me an opportunity to make a few new acquaintances, some I very much enjoyed making and a couple that were necessary to make. Both were a stretch. 

More than that, though, the journey of the past few days was one of verbal nudity. 

As far as the 5 Love Languages test goes, I usually classify myself high on Words of Affirmation. However, I am not usually a verbal affirmer. Instead, I write. 

Most times, actually, when I need to address something particularly saturated with sentiment, I write instead of speak. Thus, this blog, and my letters and emails. Raw, but hiding. 

It's not as though I think writing is wrong--indeed, letter receiving is one of the greatest things, and I love sending them. However, when all big conversations (or really any big conversation) is done via the written word, I think there is a problem. 

70% of communication is non-verbal. So when I'm not forced to look in your eyes, weigh the immediate impact of my words and decisions on your heart, watch your body language, I miss out. And even if my letters or blogs are extremely vulnerable, they lack that intense intimacy that comes through individual communication. 

Over three days' time, I had three different conversations with three different girl friends. 

In one, I sought for forgiveness; in the second, I offered an admission of cowardice; in the third, I opened the understanding . In all three, I opened the door for rejection. 

In a previous post, I defined "intimacy." With intimacy, there is a tension and an opportunity for the other person to either accept and grow or reject and let die. 

Incredibly, all three chose the former. 

It wasn't just that choice that impacted me so much, though. Rather, it was that I felt the power of having to fully engage, to admit some pretty deep and sacred feelings in the immediate presence of the ones capable of decimating my attempts. The result was access to depth that I didn't know was available to me in those friendships. Our God is an awesome God.